Celebrity
endorsement can generate huge interest in a charity campaign,
but is it worth all the trouble of getting celebrities to
take up your cause? Yes, finds David Adams, but building the
right relationships is key

Celebrities! Don’tcha just love ‘em? Of course
you do! Well, the evidence available suggests you probably
do, anyway. Of course, like me, you may well be horrified
by celebrity culture, by endless magazines filled with discussion
and candid paparazzi photos of actors, pop stars and models
of middling talent, along with the ‘celebrities’
who became famous by sleeping with someone famous, or doing
something unspeakable on a reality TV show.

You may also be depressed by the fact that so many charity
events today need to be ‘star-studded’ or fronted
by someone famous to get any degree of press coverage. Surely
the cause doesn’t need the involvement of someone
who used to be in EastEnders to give it credibility?

But that is the world we live in, and it’s both foolish
and a little hypocritical (don’t you find that copy
of Hello! in the doctor’s waiting room strangely alluring,
after all?) to pretend otherwise. If celebrity endorsement
is something that everyone else is doing then perhaps the
best thing to do is to make sure your organisation gets
as much out of dabbling in the world of celebrity as it
can.

After all, you can’t argue with results. “For
us, celebrities have made all the difference,” says
Suzanne Mainwaring, director of the Noah’s Ark Appeal,
which has raised millions of pounds towards the building
of the Children’s Hospital for Wales in Cardiff since
its launch in 2001. This was thanks in part to celebrity
supporters including Ian Botham, Catherine Zeta-Jones and
Charlotte Church. “The well-known names who have supported
our campaign have brought in enormous media interest, and
then that has led to lots of donations. I would say that
working with celebrities has been crucial in the fundraising
strategy.”

Noah’s Ark Appeal events that have featured celebrity
appearances include a fundraising walk by Ian Botham in
2002 that raised £950,000, and concluded with a grand
ball at which Catherine Zeta-Jones auctioned the gown she
was wearing.

The Appeal has benefited from the fact that, as Mainwaring
puts it, “Wales isn’t a very big place”.
Many of its famous supporters, such as the singer Max Boyce,
footballer Ryan Giggs and rugby players Jonathan Davies
and Gareth Edwards, have local connections, while the chairman
of the trustees already had personal connections with both
Ian Botham and Charlotte Church.

Once initial celebrity support helped the campaign gather
momentum and gain a high profile, the Appeal was approached
by other famous individuals, such as Shirley Bassey, who
chose it as one of two Welsh charities she wanted to support
as part of a celebration of her 50th year in show business.

There’s no doubt that even endorsements by less celebrated
individuals can help draw press coverage to an event or
campaign launch. “We will use celebrities if we think
it will make something more newsworthy for magazines that
our supporters might be reading,” says Ash Anand,
PR manager at the pregnancy health charity Tommy’s,
which devotes lots of time to research identifying which
individuals will be best suited to a particular campaign.

The actor Lucy Pargeter, from TV soap Emmerdale, is the
face of this year’s ‘Splashathon’, while
this July was also the first Pregnancy Health Month, an
awareness campaign which was fronted by the actor Angela
Griffith, models Nancy Sorrell and Penny Lancaster, and
Dr Linda Papadopoulos (from ITV’s This Morning). The
idea was that between them these individuals appeal to different
sections of the media, who in turn address different groups
of potential supporters.

There are still plenty of charities yet to start working
extensively with famous supporters, but many organisations
are now dedicating increasing amounts of resources to improving
the way they exploit celebrity connections. “We have
always recognised the value of focused and professionally
managed celebrity support,” says Mungo Denison, celebrity
liaison manager at the Children’s Society. “Managed
effectively, it allows us to make a real noise about our
work. Association with the right celebrity can offer access
to new media and a platform from which to reach new audiences.”

He agrees there can be pitfalls, such as the dangers of
“chasing after the ‘15 minute-ers’ that
spill out of the endless cycle of reality TV shows, [seeking]
any opportunity to self-promote”, because this can
leave a campaign hijacked or cheapened. “There is
huge potential for charities if they can find the right
fit with prominent, public figures,” Denison continues.
“But it is important to recognise that the more genuine
and passionate the support from a celebrity the greater
their impact will be.”

This would appear to be another good reason for trying to
find some way of forging a genuine relationship with the
celebrity you want to endorse a cause or event. If there
is some kind of personal connection between the organisation
and a celebrity then by all means exploit it. Global Angels,
founded in 2004 by Molly Bedingfield – who among other
things is the mother of pop stars Daniel and Natasha Bedingfield
– promotes and stages high profile events to support
projects in aid of children and young people worldwide,
and has put celebrity involvement at the heart of its fundraising
strategy.

Among recent events was a classical music concert held in
June in aid of Global Angels’ Step Up campaign and
its Feed A Child For A Year programme, headlined by the
UK’s most downloaded classical performer Hayley Westenra.

“Artists have a wonderful platform and opportunity
to really make an impact,” says Molly Bedingfield,
who is also executive director of the charity. “We
want to produce events in ways that haven’t been done
before, and then also to partner with projects doing something
amazing in the lives of children and young people.”
These include a variety of projects abroad, from HIV/AIDS
to nutrition and education, as well as work in the UK with
organisations including Great Ormond Street Hospital.

As Bedingfield points out, the way a celebrity is approached
is crucial, partly because of the fact so many charities
are now keen to solicit their support. “They’re
pressured by people asking them to support good causes every
day, and they usually have incredibly hectic work schedules,”
she says. “Because of that it feels like a real privilege
when they agree to get involved. It means it’s something
they’re doing because they want to, rather than because
it’s something they feel they should do.”

Of course, it is easy to be cynical about all of this. The
one and only Max Clifford warned the Charity Communications
Conference earlier this year that many celebrities are eager
to work with charities because it will help improve their
profile. But, he added, even if the celebrity is not inspired
to act through pure altruism, the positive publicity their
involvement generates will still be good for the charity.

Making contact
Clifford advises working through an individual’s PR
company rather than an agent, because the former understands
the importance of good publicity, but the latter is only
ever interested in making money.

Ideally, of course, the charity would look for a direct
link, bypassing these channels. “When you have to
go through a PR company or an agent it’s much harder
to develop a relationship,” says the Noah‘s
Ark Appeal’s Mainwaring. “I have had direct
experience of an agent who was very unhelpful and obstructive,
even though the person they represented had agreed to do
something for us. We found that, once we were able to bypass
that, the person was willing to do everything we’d
asked, and that their agent hadn’t even put all our
requests to them.”

Mainwaring says experience has taught her that the more
famous someone is, the longer the lead-in time you need,
and often the more obstacles you have to navigate. But if
you can find a way around those obstacles the rewards can
make it all worthwhile. “It’s astonishing the
impact some of these people can have,” she says. “A
year into our existence, when Ian Botham came on board,
we became high profile overnight. We were on every radio
and TV station in Wales, every day, for nine days.”

So there it is: celebrity culture may be pretty mindless
stuff, but there are real practical benefits to be gained
from getting just a little bit of that stardust to rub off
your organisation. Anyway, isn’t there just a little
bit of you that would rather like to work with the rich
and famous?